Where Did the Temples Go?

The first impression that comes to mind on hearing the word ‘temple’ is a grand stone structure with beautifully sculpted stone pillars and murtis and rows of devotees in colourful attire with offerings in their hands waiting to get a glimpse of their beloved deity. This is how it is in south India where history lives on in the modern age through ancient temples and unbroken rituals and customs. But in the north, it is impossible to find any temple that is older than 200 years. In the plains of the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers, in some of the holiest Hindu cities like Varanasi, Ayodhya, Haridwar, not a single ancient Hindu temple is to be seen today despite numerous references to majestic stone temples in the texts. Where did they go? What happened to the Hindu temples? These questions agitate Hindu youth even today.

With the rise of the nationalist movement and a rediscovery of the past, Hindus tried to systematically write their history but came up against the painful memory of invasions, subjugation and destruction. Temple after temple was wiped out in north India. The industrial-scale destruction was so widespread that there is hardly any Hindu temple in the north that is 200 years old. Magnificent temples once dotted Sindh, Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi and, especially, the Gangetic plains. Even the cities in the north-western part of the subcontinent like Multan and Peshawar were once adorned with architectural marvels that these temples were. But now none of them exists. Most of the temples we see at the holiest of the Hindu sites were built only after the imperial power of the Islamic rule weakened in the early modern era with the rise of Maratha power. New Hindu kingdoms ruled by visionaries like Ahilyabai Holkar played a pivotal role in rebuilding most of the important temples across north India. It also shows that Hindus never lost their historical sense and patiently strove to reclaim what legitimately belonged to them.

Historian Meenakshi Jain documents these stories in her recent work Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples: Episodes from Indian History. It is a brilliant yet sad read that recounts the struggle of a people to preserve what was sacred to them in the hope that one day the deities would be restored in their rightful place. The struggle for temples is also the story of the struggle of a civilisation, its determination to survive in the face of unprecedented odds. Temples have become like history immortalised in stone that sing the tales of sorrow, perseverance and hope. What was once the expression of the spiritual, artistic and cultural imagination of a civilisation now stands as the embodiment of the collective historical memory of a wounded civilisation. A wounded civilisation whose scars have just begun to heal.

However, it is not the historical injustices and devastation that’s painful to Hindus but the refusal to acknowledge the same that strikes deep into the consciousness of the Hindu mind as an act of unbearable travesty. For, it denies them even basic human dignity. It denies their existence, their pain and their hopes. It reduces them to the state of pagans of old Europe and Arabia who didn’t have the right to exist; their temples destroyed, homelands appropriated, the culture assimilated and transformed beyond recognition and, finally, even the historical memory erased.

Similar attempts were made in India to whitewash the past. But today, they have taken a turn for the worst. It’s no longer about the whitewashing but openly justifying the destruction of temples by the consortium of Hinduphobe historians, public intellectuals and journalists. We are told that no temples were ever destroyed and the Hindu memory is simply the bigotry ingrained by colonial rule. And when evidence was presented, as in the seminal two-volume work Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them by Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi and Ram Swarup, the response was to brand them as fascists rather than refute the facts presented.

When denial of temple destruction became difficult, we were told that they were not demolished due to religious reasons but for the benefit of politics and to plunder their wealth. When they were presented with their own records of the iconoclasts that demonstrated the religious bigotry at work, we were informed that Muslim rulers learnt it from Hindu rulers who regularly plundered the temples of other rulers. Never mind that they could hardly recount more than a few such examples in our millennia-old history, even after carefully obfuscating the destruction of temples with the plunder of treasury. Never mind that even in these cases, Hindu kings would always respectfully carry away deities and install them in temples in their own kingdoms and not trample them under their feet. When this simple fact was pointed out, we were told that it was just architectural recycling! Perhaps the Qutub Minar was architectural recycling because Hindus and Jains thought their temples were junk? And when asked why were murtis and pillars of the temples systematically vandalised in this ‘recycling’, we were again told that those temples never existed. All such mosques were built on vacant lands.

In the case of the Ram Mandir, they went much further. The faith of tens of millions in Lord Ram was ridiculed. Simple devotees were asked to prove his existence. Birth and education certificates of Ram were asked for in Parliament. Ram and the Ramayana were demonised as patriarchal, casteist and a violent text to delegitimise the quest to rebuild the Ram Mandir. Of course, such ‘critical analysis’ was never extended to the other side. Not satisfied, they went a step further and denied the existence of Hinduism itself by branding it as a sinister colonial construct designed to subjugate the people of India using superstition, myths and irrational belief in idol worship. Not surprisingly, their language was no different from those of the vandals who wreaked havoc in the past.

New Hindu kingdoms ruled by visionaries like Ahilyabai Holkar played a pivotal role in rebuilding most of the important temples across north India. It also shows Hindus never lost their historical sense and patiently strove to reclaim what legitimately belonged to them

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And what was the basis of all these bigoted claims? Nothing but academic obfuscation and chicanery. There is no better proof of this than the Supreme Court junking their arguments as mere opinion. In fact, the decades-long court hearing exposed these eminent historians as nothing more than partisan propagandist pamphleteers. It is instructive to read the court documents so as to understand the extent of the fraud that was attempted upon the people of India, both Hindus and Muslims, by creating confusion and preventing a peaceful resolution of the conflict by informed discussions. The historians who appeared as expert witnesses were found to be making one claim in public and another inside the courts. Most of them simply abandoned their work, which they passed off as authoritative history outside the court. Others were termed by a high court as imposters.

Take the case of ‘expert’ Sushil Srivastava. The Allahabad High Court observed: ‘Though the witness has been produced as expert historian but on page 222, he admits that he had very little knowledge of history. That being so, according to own statement of the witness, his statement cannot be taken as an opinion of an expert historian and, therefore, inadmissible under Section 45 of the Evidence Act. Even otherwise, the extract of his statement we have noticed above, make it clear that neither the witness has made any threadbare inquiry into the matter nor has he done his job honestly, yet has written a book based on hearsay and has claimed it to be a book written by an expert.’

Or, for that matter, Professor Suvira Jaiswal about whom the court observes: ‘She claims that the disputed building was constructed in 16th century by Babar at Ayodhya called Babari mosque and this statement she is making as a historian but simultaneously on page 105 she said that she has not read anything about Babari mosque and did not study thoroughly and, therefore, cannot say as to when Babari mosque came into existence. On page 121, she also admits of having not read ‘Baburnama’ at all.’

In fact, Jaiswal later confessed, “Whatever knowledge I gained with respect to the disputed site is based on newspaper reports or what others told [sic].”

What about the archaeologists fielded to oppose the Ram Mandir case? Professor Suraj Bhan says, “I did not read what features a mosque may not have. I am not a specialist in epigraphy and numismatics. I am not a geologist… I am not a student of history. I am not a specialist in architecture. My specialty was field archaeology… I did not make any study of any recorded history with regard to the disputed subject.”

Or Prof D Mandal, who says, “The Communist Party issues a red card, and I am its holder… It is true that I am of communistic thought… I never visited Ayodhya… Since it was not the issue of my research to see whether these stones can be part of the mosque, I did not make any research on them and for this very reason, I did not make any research to see whether they may be of the temple.”

Another expert witness, RC Thakran, says, “In newspapers and magazines, I have read Babur had built a mosque in Ayodhya. As a historian, I consider newspapers and magazines to be a source of knowledge… I did not certify the authenticity of these articles and monographs… I myself never did any excavation in any field…It will be wrong to say that I am not a field archaeologist; rather, I am just a table archaeologist… I have not studied any particular book on this subject.”

Yet another expert Supriya Verma, who is often quoted to sow doubts regarding the ASI excavation report, and her colleague Jaya Menon were not even present at the time of actual excavations but made wild claims that pillars unearthed from the site were actually planted or that there was not a temple but an idgah beneath the disputed structure. In fact, Jaya Menon says, “It was Dr Supriya Varma and myself, who, for the first time, said that there was an idgah under the disputed structure. I did not know that the plaintiffs of OOS no 4 of 1989 had not claimed any idgah under the disputed structure.”

The whole saga of the Ram Mandir case is a pathetic commentary on the left-dominated Indian academia that played a very destructive role in perpetuating the crisis and preventing any peaceful settlement of this centuries-old dispute. The former Regional Director of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), KK Muhammed, in his autobiography Njan Enna Bharatiyan (I, an Indian) points them out as the single-most sinister element preventing a rapprochement between Hindus and Muslims over Ayodhya.

These propagandists continue to peddle their fiction even today by sowing the seeds of confusion around the Supreme Court verdict. Deliberate lies are being spread that this judgment is based not on facts but on the blind faith of Hindus—when the property dispute has been decided in favour of Hindus based on solid archaeological, textual, historical and circumstantial evidence. But guardians of Indian ‘secularism’ want their ‘opinions’ to triumph above all, like those of any feudal lord.

Finally, justice has been meted out for a historical wrong. Hindus waited for this moment for five centuries and have taken it with dignified restraint. A majority of Muslims too have understood that they were misled by vested interests and it was wrong to destroy and appropriate the places of worship of others. There are indeed apprehensions as to where this process of reclamation will stop as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such mosques that stand atop demolished temples. And this is where the need for informed dialogue and mutual understanding comes into play. There was nothing stopping Hindus and Muslims in the 1980s from coming to an understanding over the burden inherited from the past, and there is nothing stopping them today. We must remember that we have just set an example in front of the world that a religious community of one billion that struggled for five centuries to reclaim its holy site, in the final round, left the solution to reasoned debate among the judiciary. And that the verdict of the judiciary has been graciously accepted by the Muslim masses. This is unprecedented in world history.

About The Author

Abhinav Prakash Singh

Abhinav Prakash Singh teaches economics at Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi

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